Bars and restaurants at Here East, built in the former media centre of the 2012 Olympics.
Photograph: Alamy

The summer of 2012 was the culmination of a polarising seven years. Swaths of the media, the sporting fraternity and politicians of all stripes celebrated the coming regeneration of the forgotten East End due to the planned Olympic Games. Meanwhile, academics, urbanists and local activists bemoaned the speed at which a patch of east London was transformed, resulting in compulsory purchase orders and displaced businesses.

Running up to the Games, there was a conscious effort to avoid the fiasco of Athens 2004, which left a patch of the city dilapidated before anyone had time to get nostalgic for it. Since then, we’ve been obsessed with “legacy”, as well as sceptical about who that legacy might be for.

Quick guide

Pseudo-public spaces

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What is a pseudo-public space?

Pseudo-public spaces are large squares, parks and thoroughfares that appear to be public but are actually owned and controlled by developers and corporations. They are on the rise in London and many other British cities, as local authorities argue they cannot afford to create or maintain such spaces themselves.

What access do members of the public have?

Although they are seemingly accessible to members of the public and have the look and feel of public land, these sites – also known as privately owned public spaces or “Pops” – are not subject to ordinary local authority bylaws but rather governed by restrictions drawn up the landowner and usually enforced by private security companies.

What rules govern them?

Under existing laws, public access to pseudo-public spaces remains at the discretion of landowners who are allowed to draw up their own rules for “acceptable behaviour” on their sites and alter them at will. They are not obliged to make these rules public.

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Londoners living in the Stratford area vacated their homes to avoid the crowds – one Waltham Forest resident house-swapped with someone in the Outer Hebrides – but many people’s cynicism popped like a balloon during Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony, in which local Bow boy Dizzee Rascal performed Bonkers.

But the story didn’t end once the Games were finished: the battle for the Olympic legacy is a hard-fought one. The architects and developers want you to know that the area has been revitalised. The housing campaigners want you to know it has largely been revitalised for a new, wealthier demographic. West Ham United plc want you to know the London stadium will make them a top club. West Ham fans want you to know they preferred pie and mash at Upton Park to £6 pints in Hackney Wick. Dizzee is now reading regeneration critiques and preaching about gentrification.

The organisers’ rhetoric was it was an industrial wasteland where nobody really lived. ​But that’s not true

… a city from scratch

The Olympic Village under construction in 2009. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

Ken Livingstone, then the mayor of London, made it perfectly clear why the Olympics would be a boon. “I didn’t bid for the Olympics because I wanted three weeks of sport,” he said in 2008. “I bid for the Olympics because it’s the only way to get the billions of pounds out of the government to develop the East End – to clean the soil, put in the infrastructure and build the housing.”

Yet it’s easy to forget that what many people talk of as the benefits of the 2012 Games – new rail links and roads, Westfield shopping centre and the rejuvenation of a brownfield site – was earmarked to happen anyway, as part of the Stratford City project.

The original Stratford City project was launched in the late 1990s as a 1.2 million sq metre development, the largest single planning application inside the M25 at the time. It came out of the high-speed rail development to St Pancras that has also led to a regenerated King’s Cross. In 2003, Jason Prior, who led the implementation of the London 2012 Olympic Park, admitted development would have happened even if the Olympics hadn’t come.

“Most people thought we wouldn’t win the bid,” says Jonathan Kendall of Fletcher Priest architects, the designers of the athletes’ village, now known as East Village. “The benefit of bidding was to galvanise people to think about the area.” This is the genius sleight of hand of the project: the legacy was being implemented already. Fletcher Priest was already designing what became the village and the parkland around. The Olympics just sped up the process: “a rocket booster,” as Kendall puts it.

You might assume that booster made the planning easier. Not exactly. “There was a whole pile of money, which meant chunks of Stratford City would get done more quickly,” says Vivienne Ramsey, the head planner. Now retired, she was originally head of development and building control at Newham council, before becoming head of planning at the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) when the bid was won, and finally head of the LLDC when the Games were over. “But there was then pressure to build what the ODA thought was needed. Although they said they were interested in legacy, their big raison d’etre was the Games.”

The ODA, she notes, were legally required to build a school and a health centre – but then went lukewarm. “The general tenor of the conversation was, ‘Will you let us off?’– they only did it because they couldn’t get it out of it.” One big success, she says, was the £10m for training to help locals get the jobs created by Westfield: one of her big “jump up and down moments” was the day the mall opened.

A year ago, Ramsey went for a wander around the East Village residential development. “People love living there. They have very tight management system that makes sure the communal areas are kept nice, and security guys who go around all the time to make sure there’s no anti-social behaviour.” She speaks approvingly of a “three strikes and you’re out” system for policing antisocial behaviour. “There was only one family that they’d said had to go,” she says, proudly.

Campaigners, however, say the affordable housing targets set for the residential developments in the Olympic Park have been revised down.

If there’s not enough affordable housing in the area, Ramsey lays the blame at the doors of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. “Selling council houses doesn’t hack it, because then you don’t replace them. There’s nowhere for people who don’t have much money to buy or rent.” But is it still possible for the Olympic legacy to be part of the solution? “The government says affordable rent is 80% of market rent, which is too high anyway, so it doesn’t do anything for anybody.” The only solution, she believes, is wholesale political change – which, after the Grenfell Tower fire, she says just might happen. “I’m watching to see what happens next – whether they will start letting councils borrow money and build housing again.”

New and oddly placeless … the East Village in March 2014. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty

… a place to live

“Our son Jordan was still sharing our room at the age of four so we really needed a bigger place,” says Laura Philbey, 32, who was renting a one-bedroom in Bow with her husband, David, 43, when they saw the East Village social housing properties come up in 2013.

Consent was given to build 2,818 homes before the Games, with 1,379 falling into the “affordable” category. Managed by Triathlon, a partnership between housing associations East Thames and Southern Housing Group and developer First Base, they are comprised of social rent properties that went to people from Newham and other east London boroughs, discount market rent and shared ownership properties. The remaining 1,439 are rented privately by Get Living London, owned by Qatari Diar, clients of Delancey and the Dutch pension fund asset manager, APG.

The Philbeys were one of the first residents to move into Ursa Mansions, just before Christmas. “At first it was quiet, but things have picked up,” says Philbey. “It feels like its own community, everyone is very friendly. Although you are still living in London, it feels like you are not. There are green areas where I take the kids to run around. Westfield is on your doorstep, there’s the health centre, and central London is only 15 or 20 minutes by train.”

For socialising, they go to the bars the Neighbourhood or Tina We Salute You. They recently caught the men’s hockey world league – residents get free tickets to sports events and a discount at the local Holiday Inn bar, restaurant and beauty salon, where Philbey gets her nails done. She loves the mix of social and private housing. “It’s a real diverse group of people. A lot of families with children. Quite a lot of young people but there are some old people, too.” She also likes the gated communal gardens as she feels her children are safe. “My oldest son goes up to his friend’s house to play there with his friends.”

The “village” still feels new, and oddly placeless – you could be in any new development in Melbourne or Lyon – with streets names like Olympic Park Avenue, Champions Way and Victory Square carrying an air of empty bombast. Because the area is privately owned, you can’t sleep rough on any of the streets, or set up a camera on a tripod without permission. Security guards patrol the area. They reassure Philbey. “I don’t think I would let an eight-year-old play out without there being gated gardens or security,” she says. “You don’t hear as much noise or police cars here as you did in Bow. You do feel safer. ”

Siobhan Best and her partner Jed see things a bit differently. They moved to the East Village in July 2014: “I got pregnant and our flat in Dalston was infested with cockroaches, mice and was totally baby unfriendly,” she says. Although the rent of their Mirabelle Gardens property – £1,733 for a two-bed from GLL – was not cheap, the flats were brand new, with nice furniture, gleaming appliances, free internet and Sky TV.

Best found the emptiness and the fact there were security guards patrolling “a bit spooky sometimes” but says the flats were lovely inside, spacious and with a balcony. Yet there were niggles. You had to use the utility company provided for heating, which meant that you couldn’t look for a competitive price, and bills were expensive. With Jed working, Best got lonely. “It was fine living there while working and pregnant but soon after having my daughter I felt very isolated. The local baby groups in Leyton and Stratford that I was attending closed down due to [a lack of] funding. It was really weird how a new town had been plonked in such a run down area with such poverty, something seemed very odd about the whole place.” The family moved to Essex in 2015.

… a place to be evicted from

Clays Lane – the largest residential co-operative of its kind in Europe until its demolition in 2007. Photograph: Jonathan Banks/Rex/Shutterstock

Clays Lane was the largest residential co-operative of its kind in Europe, housing 450 tenants. Julian Cheyne lived there from 1991 until it was compulsorily purchased and demolished for the Games in 2007. He and his neighbours had become accustomed to threats. “The weekend after I moved into Clays Lane in 1991, a plan came through the letterbox which said it was going to be demolished. There were always people coming up with plans on a regular basis.”

When the first diagrams for Stratford City were released in the late 90s, they initially didn’t include plans to destroy Clays Lane. “They’d have had to knock down two estates and invest quite a lot of money. I think they would have decided there was very little point. The Olympics changed that.” Peabody Homes acquired it in 2005, and it was demolished in 2007.

Kestrels used to look down from our two tower blocks. They like semi-maintained areas that don't have many people

Julian Cheyne of the Clays Lane estate

Cheyne already had passing interest in housing but the events at Clays Lane radicalised him in a sense. In 2006 he co-founded the blog Games Monitor to “debunk myths” surrounding not just London 2012 but the Olympic project in general. “The area for the Olympic Park was dismissed as an ‘urban desert’ by the ODA,” says Cheyne. “On the LLDC website now it says the site was a hive of activity and innovation – a really important industrial area. They are just liars.”

It was easy to ridicule Clays Lane. The area had a traveller site, and sat atop a hill made of reclaimed landfill. Photographs depicted unfashionable residents, chemical factories, recycling plants and a fridge mountain. But Cheyne sees it differently. “It could be a beautiful place. Kestrels used to look down from our two tower blocks – birds that like semi-maintained areas that don’t have many people in them.”

Cheyne says residents were misled over money they were entitled to, and charged too much upon leaving. “Some people had £2,000 taken off them. On what grounds? They said ‘Oh, expenses, we did a service for them’ – £2,000 worth of services?” He counted about 40 nationalities living at Clays Lane when he was there, including some people with questions around their immigration status. “Some of those guys left the estate thinking they were not entitled to be rehoused. We managed to persuade the tenancy advisers to put out a leaflet, which said these are your rights – but they never circulated it.”

Cheyne and some of his former neighbours had to go into emergency accommodation while waiting to be rehoused. Some residents were moved outside east London: Peabody had properties in Westminster, so some were housed there, where rent was a lot more expensive. Cheyne was rehoused in east London but says his rent is more than double what it was in Clays Lane.

A render of Stratford Waterfront, part of the park’s new Cultural and Education District. Photograph: Forbes Massie

… an archaeological site

Of course, five years is a drop in the bucket of the history of this area – and Dr Jonathan Gardner of University College London was one of 100 archeologists drafted in to dig under the sites of what would become Zaha Hadid’s aquatics centre and the “Pringle” velodrome. They dug 120 small trenches, and crouched in the mud through one of the coldest winters for years, in order to find excavations ranging from a Bronze Age skeleton to an 18th century boat. “[In the Bronze Age] it was a completely different landscape, very marshy, very low-lying,” Gardner says. “A lot more rivers.”

The ODA was legally required to get planning permission and to record the archaeology of the site. Only around 1% of the park was excavated, but near the Velodrome they found an entire Victorian cobbled street and the ruins of several cottages, buried under 1940s and 1950s landfill. The site was heavily contaminated with chemical waste, from its industrial heyday, so Gardner wore a protective suit.

Although the Olympics reshaped the landscape, the hills now enjoyed by residents and visitors are still sculpted landfill – shaped and moulded and sealed off, to protect a clean layer of topsoil for plants. Gardner wonders about how his role gives legitimacy to events such as the Olympics. “Quite often, they can have negative effects on the past: they wipe out historic districts, housing, jobs, rivers, roads,” he says. “The organisers’ rhetoric was it was an industrial wasteland where nobody really lived. But that’s not true.”

A Roman coin from the period of Emperor Constantine II (AD 330-335) was unearthed at the Olympic construction site in 2007. Photograph: John Stillwell/PA

With a new UCL campus being built in the Olympic Park as part of a new “Cultural and Education District” that will also house a branch of the Victoria & Albert Museum and Sadler’s Wells theatre, there may be more opportunities for excavations.

But the danger of archeology’s burgeoning role, he says, is it becomes a sop for residents who’d rather have somewhere genuinely affordable to live than another university campus.

The university first planned to build south of the park, which controversially meant knocking down the Carpenters Estate. “UCL didn’t really do itself any favours by alienating people in local communities who are desperate for housing in one of the poorest areas on the UK,” he says. The estate is still standing, for now.

The main Olympic arena is now West Ham’s home ground. On the left is Orbit, a 114.5m sculpture by Anish Kapoor, with a slide by artist Carsten Höller. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

… or as a ‘destination’

As a new piece of city, the Olympic Park isn’t radical. But neither is it the forlorn and barren white elephant many suggested it might become. No one would describe the odd situation of tens of thousands West Ham fans being herded away from the shopping hordes at Westfield, or the park’s stop-start cycle lanes, as functional. But the place does, in its way, function. People live there, but many, many more people visit – and enjoy it.

One Leyton resident says the park space was a godsend when he was on paternity leave. “It meant I could go on a two-hour walk, feed my son in the park, there was space to move and it was easy to push a buggy around or for him to walk.” What of the criticism that the development feels alien to the surrounding area? “I disagree. The first year that it opened it felt unimpressive – the trees had just been planted, it was quite bare and scrappy and there was a lot of building work – but year on year, as the park beds in naturally, it is getting better. People go to the pool, the Copper Box gym, the velodrome and other facilities for recreation. It feels to me that it’s used.”

Walking round the place as a visitor can feel a little like traversing a theme park with people living in it. Playful ways of marking territory such as #MyE20 appear emblazoned on hills or in a pond; a deeply strange hunk of twisted steel from the World Trade Centre in the car park of the aquatics centre typifies the grandstanding absurdity of parts of this place, but there are more buildings still to come: residential, cultural, recreational. Again, it’s a mixed bag.

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“Much of what’s been done is quite good,” says Simon Munk, a cycling campaigner who lives in Walthamstow. “But you only need to ride there for five minutes and you can see bad surfaces, cycle tracks that stop and start, tracks that come to junctions that are not suitable for cycling. It’s a 1980s approach, with no coherence.”

There are plans to demolish some artist space in Hackney Wick for a new walking and cycling bridge, which Munk says cyclists don’t actually need, and a new road and car bridge. The upshot will be new routes for drivers coming from the Blackwall Tunnel, creating huge rat runs through the park – not exactly a vision of a less car-reliant future. One of the park’s ironies is that there used to be two cycle tracks between the velodrome and the Clays Lane site – a race track, the Eastway, and an off-road track, the Beastway – that were lost during the landscaping and repurposing (although a new facility was built at Hog Hill in Redbridge). Munk says the Eastway cycle track is a good example of undervaluing community assets that aren’t on the radar of outsiders. “Politicians saw it as a lawless place, but it was a rich seam of London lore and life.”

Some of the Olympic Park is already threatening to fray here and there; yet it still gives off an air of abnormal newness: impersonal but with free wifi. From the comfortable charity coffee shop to the private security guards ushering you this way or that when events are on, the managed nature of the place seems to be its defining legacy.

• This article was amended on 3 August 2017. An earlier version referred to affordable housing targets set for the East Village. That should have referred to the Olympic Park. More information on the London Legacy Development Corporation was added to clarify its status.